Is participating in the BAT ICO a good idea?

in #cryptocurrency • 7 years ago (edited)

In my opinion, no.


I've been in digital advertising for a long time. A really long time. Over 15 years in fact, and I don't think BAT (Basic Attention Token) is going to "disrupt Google," Facebook or really anything at all. The creator of JavaScript is involved, and that's cool, but here's what isn't:

  1. They're cross-promoting a browser with no market share.
  2. BAT is ideologically against pixel tracking/re-targeting, which is one of the most widely used and valuable techniques in digital advertising.
  3. The dreaded "middlemen" of digital advertising, people and platforms, usually take very light margins and provide necessary services.
  4. People still (and always will) work out direct advertising deals with publishers all the time. It happens constantly. Someone will approach the owner of a specific website, app, etc. in their niche and bang out a deal directly.


In their whitepaper they make the following claim:

> In-device machine learning will match truly relevant ads to content from a level that middlemen with cookies and third party tracking are unable to achieve

Which is both bold and untested, and possibly even totally reliant on the assumption that they'll pull down a noteworthy % of the browser market share. Tracking pixels and cookies on the other hand are tried and true.

The bottom line is that while BAT may be ideologically against pixel tracking and audience re-targeting, I can tell you what, imho, most likely isn't ideologically against it: the world's largest advertising budgets. I'll be keeping far, far away from this one and holding out for EOS. I just don't see it even coming close to mainstream adoption or capturing a significant chunk of the web browser market share.

Though, of course, I could be totally wrong. I should also point out that this submission was written with HODL oriented investors in mind. I'll make no comment as to whether it's a good short term investment. I will however say that I've seen chatter of people planning to buy @ ICO and immediately dump BAT onto exchanges as soon as they're able.

What say you, steemians?

#bat #money #blockchain #technology
7 years ago in #cryptocurrency by
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    • [-]
     7 years ago (edited)

    I was worried about participating in this ioc.

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     7 years ago 

    Great post. Bats is very interesting to me, it has a great creator who has been successful so far. It's too early to tell whether this will be a success or not. I'm not convinced enough to invest just yet. I will be keeping a close eye on the project.

    [-]
     7 years ago 

    the world's largest advertising budgets

    Can you source this? While I'm not saying this isn't true, how do you know?

    [-]
     7 years ago (edited)

    I can't, and I don't know. All I can do is assume the world's largest ad budgets aren't ideologically against pixel based audience re-targeting and reword it to this:

    I can tell you what, imho, most likely isn't ideologically against it: the world's largest advertising budgets.

    Satisfactory? Are we quenched?

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       7 years ago 

      I have similar feelings due to it being tied to a browser that has failed to gain a lot of users and I just don't see this pulling massive amounts of people to it. Of course we could be wrong and this could be the missing piece that gets people to switch to using their browser to for these tokens. But it's a big ??

      I'm with you on EOS!

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         7 years ago 

        Funny thing is, none of that matters for a successful ICO launch to turn a profit.

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